break your plans (for me tonight)
by AndKatnissRaisedHerBow
Summary: "Felicity steps outside and puts the phone to her ear, because damn her if she won't always answer when he calls. She tells herself it's because of what they do, the danger of it all. God only knows what he could be getting himself into tonight, and she's in high demand after all; you never know when your resident vigilante might need tech assistance."


**This started out as a flash fic for SmoakandArrow's prompt #21, "Three Reasons", and then was abandoned after the first paragraph when I just wasn't feeling it. I came back to it later, let myself just start writing and this happened. It doesn't exactly fit in the flash fic box anymore, but SmoakandArrow still gets credit for the prompt (: **

**Enormous thanks to the always lovely stefaniegk and perfectpurls for the read through/beta-ing/suggestions (:**

**Written before 3x03 so certain bits don't totally line up to canon (i.e., mentions of Felicity's job). **

_**1.**_

It was the blue dress, the one with the cutouts in the back and little ruffles in the skirt that had caught her eye from the store window and screamed _buy me!_, the very same blue dress that had found its way to the back of Felicity's closet over the past months, given no opportunity to come out to play. It was that dress that Felicity pulled down and appraised before finally slipping into. Work, both the usual kind and the Arrow kind, had kept her busy, too busy to consider going out. But then, Gavin from across the hall, with the big brown eyes and the infectious smile asked her to dinner, and Felicity couldn't find it in her to say no.

So she'd sent Oliver and Digg a text, letting them know she was taking a night off and wouldn't be coming to the Foundry that night. Digg had told her to have fun, but Oliver hadn't said anything. She could practically see him huffing at her.

Gavin is nice. His kind eyes sparkle at her over the wine, and there's no mask for her to decipher but Felicity can't help it when she finds herself analyzing the things he says, thumbing through his apparent tells and body language in her mind to try and find something that she knows isn't there. His smiles are easy and frequent, and she can't stop herself from thinking that somehow it makes them less special. She does stop herself before she starts thinking about another man with smiles that are much more difficult to earn but, when they're honest and real, are worth a million embarrassing rambles and bad jokes if that's what it takes to bring one out.

She's halfway through her strawberry cheesecake, at the beginning of a camping story from Gavin's teenage years, and still reveling in how normal it all feels, pushing aside the thoughts of the monotony of it all in favor of how refreshing it is to be around someone who isn't allergic to talking about his past- someone who's as untarnished as she acts like she is- when her phone buzzes from its place on her lap. She rolls her eyes when she sees his picture staring at her from the screen and excuses herself from the table, complaining about demanding bosses and brushing off a comment about how she's in high-demand.

Felicity steps outside and puts the phone to her ear, because damn her if she won't always answer when he calls. She tells herself it's because of what they do, the danger of it all. God only knows what he could be getting himself into tonight, and she's in high demand after all; you never know when your resident vigilante might need tech assistance. She's on-duty 24/7 with this job, this responsibility, and those are the reasons she gives herself for stepping out of a perfectly good date to speak with her emotionally-distant boss or partner or friend or whatever they are to one another. Her readiness to answer has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that his voice is like the honey she stirs in her coffee, softening the bitterness of the world around them. She tells herself that it's just coincidence that the sound of her name on his lips is like a title and a mantle to take up and something _important_.

It shouldn't surprise her that he's speaking before she has a chance to say hello.

"Bedel is home early from his vacation. I'm on my way. Digg ran the perimeter, but we need a headcount of the inside. Can you drop by the foundry and pull up the heat signals or something?"

She doesn't even hesitate, and maybe that should bother her a little bit, but she's in high demand and no one is more demanding than Oliver Queen.

"I'm on my way."

Her heels click into the restaurant to thank Gavin for the meal and the lovely evening and to apologize for having to leave. She calls it a work emergency, and he believes her because he hasn't developed a habit of looking for lies or an eye for half-truths. Those brown eyes sparkle and that easily won smile shines as he kisses her cheek, and she doesn't feel anything at all.

Her heels click into the foundry, clanging on the stairs and clacking on the concrete floor and finally silencing when she collapses in her chair. Her comm is in her ear, and her hands are flying on the keyboard before she's even fully seated, and it's all business and serious tones when she gives Oliver the number of guards stationed around his target's house, but a smile sneaks onto her face anyways when she glances around the newly renovated cave she's come to think of as _home_ and his voice is in her ear, honey cutting through the bitterness, telling her that he's sorry that her precious blue dress never saw the end of its first date.

_**2.**_

Felicity had always thought she liked a schedule, a routine that she could fall into and lose herself in, never needing to think too hard about taking a different route home or to lie in bed at night wondering if she'd set her alarm to the right time to make the meeting in the morning. She'd thought she would thrive in the constancy, the certainty of knowing what tomorrow held and taking it in good faith that another life or death situation was not lurking around her next corner. She'd thought all these things at one point in her life, had lived in the world of eight a.m. wake up calls and coming home every night in time to spend some quality time with her Netflix queue. She had enjoyed the simplicity of it all, even.

Now, though, listening to the monitors around her beep and drone in sync with one another, a sick, clinical symphony keeping perfect time with the stand-in metronome that was Barry's heart, Felicity despised the monotony of it.

She had come to crave the quiet moments over the past year. The silence when the dust settled and she sat in the foundry with her boys or on her couch with a glass of red, the calms after their ceaseless storms, when her heartbeat could return to a normal pace and no one was in immediate danger. These were the moments when Oliver would lay a hand on her shoulder, assuring her that he was whole and present and alive, and she would let herself breathe a sigh of relief that at least for now, at least until tomorrow when the sun came up and another monster reared its ugly head, they were all safe.

She had expected to feel something akin to that relief when she saw Barry in front of her, breathing now without the assistance of machines and his heart beating strong and steady, echoed by the monitor at his side. She had expected it would make her feel better, but sitting next to him in the uncomfortable plastic-covered chair, Felicity only felt exhausted.

If she'd known the disaster the particle accelerator would cause, Felicity thinks that she would've found a way to talk Barry into staying in Starling for a little while longer. But life had a funny way of handing her a whole lot of _maybe's_ and _almost's_ so she didn't entertain the thought for long. She couldn't go back and fix it now anyways, so what was the point in dwelling on it?

It's getting dark out, and her stomach has been rumbling irritably at her for the past hour so she doesn't turn down the sandwich that Cisco passes to her, along with a sympathetic look and a reassuring hand clamped around Barry's ankle in a gesture that seemed to say _hang in there_.

It's only peanut butter and jelly, but it's the only thing Felicity has had to eat all day and she's grateful for it. She's been in Central City for several days now, spending more time at Barry's bedside than is probably appropriate for someone who was supposed to only know him through the investigation at Queen Consolidated, but she can't bring herself to care enough to turn her rental car in the opposite direction and head away from Star Labs, back to the train that would take her home again to Starling where her life is waiting.

She hasn't heard from Oliver since she's been gone, but that doesn't surprise her. Turns out he's not too big a fan of any kind of communication, text and email included. She talked to Digg earlier in the day, though, and he mentioned that Oliver had asked about her. She'd tried to ignore how that made her lips twitch up on the corners in the smallest smile. "He's lost without you," Diggle had joked, his smile blatantly apparent in his voice even over the phone. Felicity replied in kind, "He wouldn't know how to navigate his own house anymore without me to track his GPS."

She tried not to wish that Oliver would call and check in himself, instead of finding out from Diggle where she was or how she was doing or whatever it was he asked about.

The sandwich is almost gone when Felicity glances up at the television in the room. It's high on the wall and the image is a little spotty - Cisco and Caitlin having moved it in hoping that the sound would be good for Barry - so she has to squint her eyes a little to make out the words on the news banner at the bottom of the screen, but _"apartment bombing in Starling City"_ catches her eye and she's out of her chair and saying goodbye to Barry before she has a chance to even think that the explosion might not be anything Arrow-related.

She'll burn in hell for thinking it, but Felicity hopes that it is the work of some new bad guy in town and not the result of faulty wiring or a badly placed lit candle. Anything but the monotony and routine of waking up every morning to spend her day making conversation with the heartbeat of a boy who might not ever wake up.

Felicity will deny it until the day she dies, but something flutters back to life inside of her when Oliver turns pleased, surprised eyes on her in the office the next morning. She's needed here, he tells her, and she's always been able to read him like a book, so it doesn't escape her notice that he looks as strained as she feels, but she smiles because he needs her and she never expected any sort of admission like that but it's the unpredictability that she loves.

_**3.**_

Ray sneaks up on her.

It's slow, the way her anger and irritation evolves into something that fits more into the box labeled amusement and maybe even enjoying his company when he shows up in her office during slow days to take her to lunch or invites her to company functions. By no means is he simple or uncomplicated. The feelings of shame and betrayal still creep up on her when she's alone in her townhouse at night, because regardless of whatever lies between them, her loyalty is to Oliver, and there's something that feels so wrong about not hating the guy that took his company from him, but Ray is easy, and he makes her laugh; he understands her mind in terms of code and Doctor Who references, and it's not the intimate, encompassing way she and Oliver are familiar with one another, but it's something , and for once in her life it's a good thing in front of her that isn't just out of her reach.

She still drives to Verdant every night, disappearing into the Foundry that is her home and her grave all at once; her safety and her demise intertwine so completely that she feels like it's her whole life, her beginning and her end, wrapped around the sparring dummies and the archery targets, curled in the dark corners next to Digg's extra suit and Roy's bow and Oliver's everything.

She keeps coming back because it's where she's needed, the one place where there is always a purpose to what she does and people she doesn't have to hide anything from. Saving the world, or at least their world, is never boring or monotonous or any of those things she's come to despise when her normalcy turned into something out of one of those complicated action movies she doesn't have the time to watch anymore. She's comfortable in the foundry, if not occasionally restless, arriving later and leaving earlier than before, but no one says anything about it.

The flicker of sadness in Oliver's eyes when she brushes past him every night on her way out isn't lost on her, because they're Oliver and Felicity and the ties that bind them together are never weakened the way she knows her resolve would be if not for the distance they're keeping. He's hurting, and even though it's a misery that he chose, she was the one to close the door and lock it on what might one day be, and it kills her to know she's played a part in the pain etched into his whole being whenever they're in the same room.

She doesn't want to think that she's become another scar in his vast collection, another could've been that almost was but ultimately added to the line of people he's hurt, battles lost in the war to protect them.

She'd always hoped she could be his happy story, the one thing that threw his track record for a loop and turned into something good instead of just another item to be ticked off his list of losses. She'd had dreams of easy kisses on lazy mornings, hands that never had to pull away, toothbrushes living side by side and baskets of blue dress shirts and pink yoga pants as tangled together as the two of them have somehow always been. They were foolish wishes, perhaps, but it doesn't make it hurt any less whenever she sees him and remembers how her lucky stars failed her.

(Because for all that she is, Felicity can't bring herself to blame him for it all. There's such a long list of sins to his name already, so much that he bares the consequences of blame for, and she can't- _won't_- add to it.)

Her days are spent at QC, where the steady schedule and refreshingly challenging work from her new position in the IT department are a welcome change. The employees around her are snide; not-so-quietly whispered remarks about how she slept her way to the top and then got stuck at the bottom again when everything fell apart bounce around the offices and halls as she walks past. She doesn't let it bother her, choosing instead to remind herself of the fact that most of them would probably be dead if not for her and her team's actions just a few months ago.

Still, she's grateful to have her own office. It's quiet and away from everyone else, and it feels nice to lose herself in strings of code and numbers for hours on end.

There are visitors from time to time. Less experienced employees than herself that have a question it seems only she can answer, people from other departments that need help with their computers or come to inform her of a crashed server somewhere in the building. Ray comes by at least once every couple of days. Diggle drops by when he can, sometimes bringing the baby and grabbing a few quick minutes with her to catch up on things not Arrow-related before heading back home to Lyla. Felicity likes those visits, enjoys spending time with Digg, and even more so, getting to hold the precious little human that changed so much for all of them. Sara coos and giggles at her, tiny fists reaching for the ruffles on her blouse or her necklace, and Felicity is totally taken with the child. She cradles her close, making faces and smiling brightly when the tiny girl spouts nonsense sounds, seemingly having so much to say to her captive audience. It seems fitting, how they lost one member of their team- their _family_- only to gain a brand new one in the same breath.

She misses Sara, the blonde who had managed to cement her place amongst them despite having only been with them a little while. The pain is always there, the ache when it dawns on her that the other woman won't be dropping by the foundry anymore or popping up during missions when she returns from wherever the hell she's been that month. Looking at the little girl in her arms, though, glancing up to see John smiling so proudly at the beautiful bundle of life that he's created, the family that he never expected, Felicity feels the pain ebb away, calming into something not so unbearable and overwhelming.

Oliver visits once. He knocks on her office door, even though _Felicity Smoak_ is written plainly in vinyl on it, and he's never had a problem waltzing right into her space before, but he knocks and she's not sure if she should be bothered by it or appreciate it.

She throws a "come in," in the general direction of the entrance without looking up from her computer screen, and he steps in with a sheepish expression.

"You'd think the woman down the hall had seen a ghost. Apparently, it's not customary for the former owner of a company to be seen in the new IT department."

Felicity smiles despite herself, chuckling at his lame attempt at a joke because it'd been a long time since he'd last used that easy, casual tone with her. He holds a bag of takeout, and she motions for him to sit, clearing the clutter from her desk as he passed her a carton of sweet and sour chicken.

They keep their distance, ignoring tricky subjects like dates and explosions and dead girls and loneliness, but he stays for her entire lunch hour. They talk the whole time, conversation coming easily because she's Felicity, and he's Oliver, and they're still bound together by forces she can't name, but it's like a magnetic force drawing them together time after time and refusing to let them stray.

If he notices the awkward way she stills when his hand passes over hers to take the empty carton from her, or her disappointment when she realizes their hour was over, he doesn't say anything about it.

Ray stops by the next day, sweeping in the door like he's keenly aware that he really does own the place and asking her to be his date at the company gala that night. He knows it's last minute, he tells her, but he'd forgotten about it until the night before. She knows he's lying, she can read people well enough to know when they're bluffing, but she goes along with it anyways, telling him that she's only accepting his invitation because of the open bar.

He grins at her, saying a million thank you's and offering her the rest of the day off. She doesn't take it, because she knows that as soon as she's alone the feelings of guilt and betrayal will creep up on her and she'll back out of the whole thing. She stays at work, finishes her day and tells Digg that she won't be at the foundry that night.

It isn't until she's stepping through the arched doorway of the enormous hotel ballroom that Ray's rented out for the event and his arm links with hers that she realizes this will be her role for the entirety of the night: his date, and nothing more.

It's boring, if she's honest.

Felicity likes to think she knows her way around the business world. She can handle being around the big names of Starling, but both for obvious reasons and for reasons she refuses to address, this particular gala is more unbearable than anything she ever had to attend in her capacity as Oliver's EA. She pushes away the idea that Oliver would never hold her at his arm like an interactive accessory; ignores the way her eyes subconsciously seek out his close-cropped head of hair, missing the little thrills that would come over her when she would meet his eyes across the room as she moved to deftly rescue him from whatever high-up had him cornered in conversation.

Her entire night consists of smiling politely at people she already recognizes from having dealt with before and making small talk with Ray or the handful of other guests dragged along as dates and plus ones. It's too normal, too monotonous for her tastes and she's getting antsy, itching to have something to do. She never thought she'd miss making excuses for Oliver's late arrivals or averting attention when he has to slip away, but she _does_ and that's why she finally makes her way over to bar, asking the bartender for the most expensive thing he's got on the shelf.

Her phone buzzes in her clutch before she's taken the first sip of her drink, and her heart hasn't quite learned yet to stop fluttering when she his picture smiles at her from the contact ID.

She takes the time to at least step out of the room before answering, half fearing that something's gone wrong while she's away from the foundry and half glad to have a distraction from the gala.

It _really_ shouldn't surprise her that he's speaking before she has the chance to say hello.

"Are you busy right now?" Oliver's voice is strained, trying too hard to sound normal and failing miserably because she's always been able to read him like a book, and even over the phone, he can't hide anything from her.

"No, not really." It's not a lie, though it's not the whole truth either. The soft hum of the din from the party, if you could call it that, sounds behind her from the other side of the closed doors, and there's not a doubt in her mind that she wouldn't regret leaving if she was needed elsewhere.

"Can you- can I come in, then?" He's speaking in a timbre she rarely hears from him, the words falling into the air and sinking, hollow and collapsing in on themselves like their inner workings are too weak to hold them together.

"Oliver, where are you?"

"Outside your house."

There's a pause as she tries to come up with her next words, and she can sense that he's holding something back from her in that inherent way that she senses when things are off with him. He sounds tired, defeated, nothing like the hero she knows he is. It scares her to hear him sound like that, like there isn't a soul on earth that believes he can make it, and especially not himself.

His voice is quiet when he speaks again, a barely-there whisper that she might have missed if she weren't hanging on his every syllable.

"I'm tired of being alone, Felicity,"

She doesn't even hesitate with her response.

"There's a key in the flower pot by the door. I'm on my way there."

She hangs up before he can say anything, ask where she is, or protest her dropping everything to go to him. They can deal with that later.

Her heels clack out of the hotel, never even going back inside to say goodbye to Ray, opting instead to send him a quick text letting him know she's gone.

There's no hesitation or doubt in her while she drives back to her townhouse, because he's Oliver, and she's Felicity and his voice is the honey that balms the bitterness of life, and he says her name like it's the most precious word he's ever learned in any of the languages he speaks, and the ties that bind them together never weaken, no matter how far they pull away from one another or what lies between them.

(He's waiting for her when she gets there, and so what if she's dressed in one her best gowns because that's the least of her worries when she drops to her knees beside him on the porch, his red-rimmed eyes meeting her determined, hopeful blue, and she doesn't think twice about twining her arms around his neck and bringing him as close she can get him.)


End file.
